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Watch Curry Barker's Obsession. I’m Not Asking.
- Sakshi D
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Obsession is the horror debut that ripped my nervous system out
I texted my friend, Marc, at midnight after watching this. The message said, “what the HELL.” He responded, asking if I was okay. I told him I was better than okay, I was completely ruined, and then I sent him the trailer. That is the whole review. That should tell you everything.
But I’ll go deeper because I need to expel these thoughts somewhere. Curry Barker's Obsession has been lodged in the back of my head like a splinter since I watched it, and I cannot get it out. This is the type of horror movie that ends up on my phone list, the one where movies go to never be questioned again. It earned its spot faster than anything I’ve watched this year, yes, even Off Campus!
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿/5
What You Need to Know
Bear is a painfully shy guy with a crush on his coworker Nikki. He doesn’t tell her. He gets a trinket called a One Wish Willow, cracks it in half, and wishes for her to love him more than anyone on the planet. The wish works. You’d think great, a romantic comedy, done. No. What follows is one of the most genuinely upsetting watches I’ve sat through in years.
Nikki starts acting strangely wrong. Possessively, intensely, wrong. And the deeper the movie goes, the more you realize that the real Nikki is fully conscious and trapped inside her own body while this wish-version of her runs everything. The moment that clicks is horrible in the best way possible.
Bear, meanwhile, is not the hero here. He starts out sympathetic and slowly becomes someone you’re actively rooting against. The movie is smart - it argues his obsession was never love to begin with. He was infatuated. She was an idea to him. The wish ripped the whole thing into the open and made everyone suffer for it.
What Worked in Curry Barker's Obsession
Indie Navarrette. The whole conversation starts and ends there.
She plays Nikki, and she is doing things in this film that I haven’t seen a horror actress pull off since Toni Collette in Hereditary. She holds a smile on camera for a stretch of time that made my skin crawl straight off my body.
Her physical performance, her voice, the way she moves through a dark room, it is nightmare fuel executed with complete precision. If she doesn’t get awards attention, I’m taking it personally, and so should you.
The gore delivered. This movie was apparently trimmed down from an NC-17 to get its R rating, and you can feel the edges where things got pulled back. But when the violence shows up, there is no softening and no early cut. Practical effects, full commitment, totally earned. My fellow gore lovers will not be disappointed.
The score needs its own sentence. Synth-driven and atmospheric in a way that should be calming but keeps landing wrong. It’s the audio version of looking at something that seems fine until you notice it has too many teeth. I would listen to it on my own time.
What Could Have Been Better
There’s a thread involving Nikki’s consciousness, the moments when the real her surfaces, that I desperately wanted more of. The film gestures at it beautifully and then moves on. I was not ready to move on.
There’s also a stretch in the middle where a character has information that absolutely calls for dialing 911, and the movie knows it, which tugged me out for a beat. Minor. Very minor.
Scenes That Have Not Left My Head
The phone call. Bear calls to change his wish, not cancel it, change it. And while he’s on the line, he hears something in the background that recontextualizes the entire film up to that point. I physically sat back in my seat.
Another interesting scene is when Indie says "No no no..., in the same cadence as Betty Gabriel playing Georgina in Jordan Peele's Get Out. The scene happens in a bar out of the blue.
The ending is brutal, and I mean that with full respect. I won’t spoil it, but the alternate version apparently had a different outcome, and the studio pushed for what made it to screen. They made the correct call. It is the most devastating option available, and it’s the right one.
My Final Verdict
This movie was made for under a million dollars, shot in 20 days, and it will outlast things with 10x (the newest Conjuring movie included) the budget in my head. Curry Barker is genuinely talented, and I’ll be watching everything he touches from here on out. This is an 11/10 from me, and I have no notes.
If you’ve already seen Curry Barker's Obsession, I need to know what you thought about the ending specifically. Drop it in the comments because I have been spiraling, and I need people to spiral with.